Quentin Tarantino has handed in the final draft of his spaghetti western script Django Unchained to Weinstein Co., his agency WME confirms. According to Tarantino Archives, the title Django Unchained pays homage to both the Sergio Corbucci original Django, not to mention Takashi Miike’s Sukiyaki Western Django, which features Tarantino (see clips for both below).

I just happened to be in the midst of re-watching a couple of good old Spaghetti Western: those by Sergio Leone of course, but also Corbucci’s Django from 1966 (IMDb, Wikipedia) as well as the Sabata trilogy by Gianfranco Parolini (Wikipedia). I watched Sukiyaki Western Django (2007, IMDb, Wikipedia) by the extremely prolific and often gory Takashi Miike last year (I’ve also re-watched Audition lately and I’m still shivering at the memory of it).

Bellow is the original Italian trailer for the original Django (no subtitles). The film was shot mostly in Italian and it’s really worth it to watch it with English subtitles (so you can experience unshaved, dirty, smoking cowboys swearing in Italian).

Corbucci’s Django was released in Blu-ray last year. Here are the first few lines of a review one can read on Mondo Digital (dedicated to “weird and wild cinema”):

For European film fans, the name “Django” has become synonymous with action-filled spaghetti westerns. For everyone else, it regrettably means very little. A contemporary of Sergio Leone’s legendary Dollars films with Clint Eastwood, Django is a much dirtier, rougher film which also injects conventions of Japanese cinema and pulp novels into the western framework. Perhaps due to its difficult title, Django never broke out of cult status in America but spread like wildfire over Europe, kicking off a host of tangentially related imitators which continued into the 1980s (and even beyond if you count Sukiyaki Western Django). (read more)

For more on Spaghetti Western, visit Tarantino.info’s sister site The Spaghetti Western Database (also founded and administered by Sebastian Haselbeck):

The Spaghetti Western Database (short: SWDB) is a community-driven website about Italian Western movies. It works like a Wiki, that means every registered user can contribute to it and it is constantly improving “itself”. The goal of this website is to provide an easy-to-find resource for everything related to Spaghetti Western and the first every Database of that genre that you can actually easily search. (About)

The SWDB is the first sister site of The Quentin Tarantino Archives that was launched and it didn’t take long for the director himself to admit his admiration for this site. It has been a huge success on the internet and a beloved location for fans around the globe to exchange ideas about these classic movies and do research. Our own Top 20 has not gone unnoticed, so the director took some time out of his schedule while shooting Inglourious Basterds, to submit his own personal Top 20. Enjoy.

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